QFI panel at TEDinArabic Doha Summit.
Doha: With extensive experience in Europe and the Americas, Qatar Foundation International (QFI) continues to support educators, administrators, students, researchers, and other experts across the Arabic language ecosystem to advance the value of teaching and learning Arabic as a global language. Because of QFI’s work, students and educators have access to life-changing opportunities, networks, and support.
In such an opportunity QFI hosted recently a session at the TEDinArabic Doha Summit. The session, ‘Knowledge of Languages is the Doorway to Wisdom,’ was a standing-room only event featuring six non-native speakers from Brazil, Germany, and the United States.
“The Arabic language is a sea,” said panelist Meg Grieve speaking at the session.
The three student panellists learned Arabic through QFI-supported secondary-school programming in the United States. “Our experiences learning Arabic have been great because of Ustaz Fadi,” both Susie Hayes and Shelby Holloway said of their Arabic teacher at Lindblom High School in Chicago, Illinois. “Because I learned Arabic,” Hayes added, “I’ve gotten to know some of the best people in my life.” All six panellists in the Discovery Session, both students and educators, learned Arabic as non-native speakers.
“Even as I teach my students, I learn from them,” said panellist Paula Caffaro, an Arabic lecturer at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Caffaro, Paula Roetscher and Caroline Sibley all began their language studies in school and now teach Arabic at the secondary schools and universities in the Brazil, Germany, and the United States respectively.
